Tuesday, July 23:
Unfortunately R. did not have a good night, but he works out his “figurations,” so that only today is he really finished. “Music has no ending,” he says. “It is like the genesis of things, it can always start again from the beginning, go over to the opposite, but it is never really complete. Do you remember how undecided I was about the ending of the first act of Die Meistersinger? I am glad that I kept back Sieglinde’s theme of praise for Brünnhilde, to become as it were a hymn to heroes.”
In the afternoon he corrects the biography and then meets me in the park at the “Sappho sofa,” a lovely stone bench gloriously situated beside the pond.
In the evening I read out loud the letter on the Goethe Foundation; I represent the visual arts! Letter from Marie Schl. and commission from Philadelphia for a Mass!